Darla managed to catch James Nimmo’s great speech. (She was going to post here about it on Saturday, but things got too crazy.)

At the Peace Fest, James, Darla and John Walters all had these little cameras and I was so envious, I came home and ordered one for myself, getting a great deal on a Flip Ultra at Amazon, which included a free tripod. With free shipping, it won’t arrive until the 24th. I can’t wait!

So here’s how, by aggressively pushing back over a $2,500 donation from one franchisee of an international fast food chain, one pissed off gay man got sexual orientation and gender identity added to the entire company’s employment policy. Said company sent a letter to over 30,000 owners in 85 countries explaining the new policy. What’s more, the offending franchisee was chastised for violating policy regarding use of the brand name, and subsequently has requested that the donation be refunded by the Yes on 8 campaign.

Tell us how it’s done, Mike. (So easy you won’t believe it — although it helps to have scary WaPo-generated nickname to throw around.)

I was reading through the Human Rights Campaign’s list of companies that gave to Yes on 8, the California referendum that removed marriage equality from the state’s constitution. When I saw a franchisee of an international company gave $2,500 to opponents of equality, I immediately knew I would require someone at the company’s world HQ to address this. Or, I would.

So, after a few discussions, I informed the company’s spokesperson that they had until today to take the following three actions:

1) Repudiate the franchisee’s gift
2) Make a gift in the same amount to an organization fighting for true equality
3) Immediately add sexual orientation and gender identity to the corporation’s non-discrimination policy.

Some thought this was a misplaced target in the overall campaign. I was one of them. It was one stupid franchisee among 30,000. But Mike is smarter than me, and more motivated to take no prisoners:

Some have asked if I have been too harsh. It’s an easy one to answer. “Harsh?” Are you kidding me? Let me tell you about harsh. This is a civil war waged upon free and just people by those who seek to control them. In 1776 the punishment for such treatment was not a boycott. Those objections came at the end of a bayonet. Thank goodness times have changed.

[...] Luckily, we have a weapon far more powerful than the end of a gun. We have a handle, a handle on a spigot of money. Mess with the gays and watch the “pink wrath” slowly twist the spigot until they’re at the table begging for forgiveness. (see: Coors, Ford, Microsoft, et al.)

(emphasis added)

Read the story at Page Q — and patronize your local Subway!

As Jane Hamsher states, the real message of today’s vote, from the 32 Democratic Senators who gave Lieberman a pass, and, yes, President-elect Obama, who whipped the vote:

This is about telling you that you mean nothing. That democracy is a nice word, but it should never threaten the entitlement of the most exclusive club in the world.

No matter what Joe Lieberman does, the people who are protecting him hate you much more than they hate him.

We just continue to fight for accountability and progressive values to make their way to the top.

• We will give you an ice cream cone. However, no sprinkles. And when you eat your ice cream cone, wishing you had sprinkles for it, maybe you’ll think about what you’ve done.
• You are no longer allowed to hang your coat in the Democratic Caucus cloakroom. You must hang your coat on a hook which we have had installed next to the cloakroom for your convenience.
• Your parking space has been moved two rows back. We think the extra 19 steps each morning will give you a lot of time to reflect on your actions.
• Your committee meetings and hearings will now be aired only on CSPAN3 — the MTV2 of CSPANs.
• The next time you go on Hannity’s show on Fox News and proclaim that President Obama is a terrorist-sympathizing, baby-eating, grandma-raper, we reserve the right to be quoted by the Washington Post saying that although you are a very good guy and a close personal friend, that your comments were probably not fully accurate. So THERE.

Actually, Turncoat Joe’s punishment was not nearly as harsh as that. Seriously.

Remember: No Milk for Cinemark!

Boycott Cinemark Facebook group

Well I think Mark Ryan of Kingfisher can top that. He road a horse, with mule and dog in tow, from Okahoma to Washington state. Took five months — and  he’s not back yet because after he decided to get a truck to drive back, the truck broke down.

You just can’t count on those new-fangled contraptions.

Long Ride: Oklahoma cowboy rides his horse 2,000 miles to Washington state — Newsday.com.

Well, after editing to remove all the sports crap, I got quite the collection. Here’s a sample:

Racists rise. The Oklahoma woman who was killed in Louisiana during a Klan initiation which may be part of a backlash to an Obama presidency. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the KKK, says that racist incidents are rising. And the Christian Science Monitor reports

Supremacist propaganda is already on the upswing. In Oklahoma, fringe groups have distributed anti-Obama propaganda through newspapers and taped it to home mail boxes. Ugly incidents such as cross-burnings, assassination betting pools, and Obama effigies are also being reported from Maine to Alabama.

Oklahoma: Love it red or leave it. Progressive Obama supporter Robin Meyers wrote a column entitled “Dead wrong and proud of it” for the Oklahoma Gazette, commenting on our state’s election results being out of whack with the prevailing trend. So several commenters misinterpreted what he said and told him to move out of state and take his un-Okie values with him. And so it goes…

Dog gone. A bit less traumatic, but still … a Tulsa blogger went to buy an Obama shirt for her dog at Cafepress, and found “hate rhetoric” even amidst the pet wear.

We got your scalpers, right here. Those more positive about Obama moving into the White House are suggesting that it might be easier to get tickets to the inauguration from an usual source — say Republican legislators in, uh, Oklahoma.

Every member of Congress, Democrat and Republican, gets a certain number of tickets. You know the Democrats are going to maxed out - so try to get them from members of Congress in states that didn’t vote for Obama.

I mean, how many people from Oklahoma think this is the nation’s biggest historical moment?

Win-win. This guy should totally get a ticket and front-row seat:  A 103 year old grandson of slaves who lived to vote for and see a black man elected to the presidency. Robert Jones said he never thought it would happen. “Not in my day. Not in my day,” he said. “I never thought I would see it in my time.”

Robert, this one’s for you.

No, my parents weren’t divorced, married for over 60 years.

In a way, I was a feminist before I even knew there was such a thing. I rejected marriage before I knew I was gay, before I got overtly political, before I finally called myself an atheist. As a feminist, I think marriage is an archaic institution, and contemporary divorce statistics prove my point while those entering both conditions, serially, nonetheless disagree with my analysis.

I look at marriage as a social contract that was designed to control women and insure paternity of children. It’s the 21st Century, let’s just throw the whole thing out. However, mine is clearly a minority view. Despite the cognitive dissonance, marriage doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Folks just seem to like it (again and again!). I’ve come to tolerate this strange need to get state sanction of relationships. )And unlike some, I don’t feel the need to force my opinion and practice on everyone else.)

In the gay community, the marriage equality movement has been around for quite a while. Lots of gay people would like to get officially married to their beloved, and not just for those rather important legal perks like hospital visitation. It means something to them, just as it does to the serially married heterosexuals. Most gay and lesbian citizens are really more like the Nelsons, the Cleavers or the Huxtables than they are like me. That is the great irony of this whole brouhaha.

So what to do? I think some language adjustments would be helpful. Gays (the lucky ones in progressive states) have been thrown the “civil union” bone as a separate but unequal alternative. In most cases, as I understand it, this takes care of most of the legal ramifications of partnerships in our society. But, in order that some paranoid so-called religious nutcases don’t get their panties in a twist, there have to be two forms available from the state, one for straight couples, one for gays and lesbians. One labeled “marriage certificate” and one labeled “civil union.”

Of course the distinction is ridiculous. Where are those fiscally responsible, small-government conservatives when you need them?

Just have the state — and here I mean government, in every fucking state of the U.S. — provide civil unions for consenting adults, which are easy to get and easy to abolish. It’s a legal and social contract and has nothing to do with anyone’s god or any church dogma.

Frankly, I think it should be available to partnerships of two or more. What’s it to ya? Throughout human history, societies have formed different kinds of affinity groups, and yes, the sacred task of raising children might have been performed by entities other than just the biological mother and father. In fact, I got news for Focus on the Family: the latter system, the “nuclear family,” is NOT the norm, not even close. Somehow, despite this crazy behavior of social elasticity and community building, culture has progressed even to the zenith of producing James Dobson.

With this arrangement, religious groups can then choose to provide an additional imprimatur to the partnerships that fit whatever little corner of humanity they approve of. No one forces them to do anything they don’t want to do. Give these neanderthals the legal exclusions for their cultdoms so they won’t have to employ or give communion to someone that makes them feel icky (or involuntarily and inexplicably horny). Let’s see how that works out for them in the long run. Not well, I suspect. With affirming alternatives, sane people will gravitate away from hate and toward love naturally.

But the 300 that attended the corresponding rally in Oklahoma City (not to mention the thousands across the country) were ignored by the city’s paper — I no longer will incorrectly call it a “newspaper” but it is printed on paper, so at least that part’s true. Again, no surprise, because the Oklahoman habitually refuses to cover the news and events that come from the liberal or progressive end of the political spectrum. “Habitually refuses” is a nice way of saying they have conspired and are conspiring to erase our existence from their pages. It is the largest paper in the state (though shrinking rapidly! Yay!) and it still has a lot of influence in political and cultural arenas (again, less and less so thanks to the internet) so the conspiracy is not piddling, even as their overall status is being reduced.

The OKC event did get covered by a couple of local TV news teams, which is great, but that doesn’t lessen the harm done by being erased from history time and again by the Oklahoman.

Frankly, I’m fed up with it and am resolved to do something about it. I’m exploring several options — including boycotts, petitions, demonstrations. A meeting with the paper’s management is a good place to start, but without some kind of threat to their revenue, I wouldn’t expect such a meeting to have any effect — those people are ideological and have to be moved by other forces than an appeal to simple fairness.

I lived in Waco, Texas, for a while, and I guarantee you that that area is politically and culturally more conservative overall than Central Oklahoma, yet the newspaper there covered peace and justice events — and not just during the nearby Camp Casey action in August 2005, but before that and well after. We might have liked more expansive and positive coverage, and they didn’t cover every single thing we did — no one expects that. But we regularly got a photo of an action — even if only four or five people participated. But they didn’t ignore our press releases, or refuse to send a camera person and/or reporter when they had one available, or keep the fact of our existence and work hidden from their readers. They covered the fucking news that was happening in their community!

Thankfully, the Web gives citizens the opportunity to participate in a new kind of journalism that is rising from the grassroots. Old media is losing this battle because they don’t or can’t adjust to new realities. They are making attempts to use the Internet, but struggling to find a successful method to make it profitable.

So if the Oklahoman wants to continue their march to obsolecence, they can continue to alienate a significant portion of their community by being ideological and reactionary beyond all reason. I’ll dance on their grave, but in the meantime, I expect them to function as the newspaper they purport to be and once in a while cover events their owners and editorial board don’t necessarily endorse.

Oh, and the effing letters to the editor situation is also now on the table. Enough! We’re not going to take it anymore!

I know that we all complain about the Oklahoman and that those who’ve lived here a lot longer than I have maybe just become resigned to the status quo. I hope that we can all band together at this vulnerable moment for the Oklahoman’s bottom line, and make the changes we need happen. Yes, we can!

Stay tuned, I will elaborate about some action steps on this in the near future.